Vladimir(47)
“You look rough,” said Alexis, soft care in her voice.
“I know. I miss you.”
Alexis climbed into the backseat and Sid followed her. In the rear-view mirror I watched as Alexis squeezed her leg, scolding. “Babe, your mother is not a chauffeur.”
I spoke into the reflection. “Thank you, Alexis, why don’t you come into the front seat.” We often played the little game parents played with partners, pretending we were more aligned than she and Sid.
“I would love to,” she said, and thanked me again for coming to pick her up. I wished Alexis would be a little less polite with me, it enforced a distance between us. Whenever they visited, she and Sid became a conspiratorial unit, having what I imagined were honest conversations behind the closed door of the guest room and then emerging and making removed small talk with John and me. Still, I liked her considerateness better than Sid’s childhood friends, the entitled spawn of fellow academics who opened my refrigerator without asking, borrowed my books without telling, and on summer days used to drop by and swim in my pool whether Sid was there or not.
“I love your clip,” I said. Awkward around most women, I had trained myself to notice something on their person I could compliment. Compliments made you supplicant, equal, and master all at once. Supplicant because you are below, admiring; equal because you have the same taste; and master because you are bestowing your approval. In my life I’ve been wounded more by compliments than I have by insults. (Once when I asked an acquaintance what they thought of my second novel they said, “I can tell you worked so hard on it.”)
“Thank you,” she said. “A friend made it for me.”
“Who?” Sid asked from the back. And they proceeded to discuss the friend who Sid thought was someone she met at a picnic but realized was someone else she had met at a party.
Excused from the conversation, I let my imagination return to John and Cynthia. The picture they made at the door grew more and more surreal in my mind; they became like figures in a biblical illumination, emanating golden rays. Had Cynthia been wearing an off-the-shoulder bandage dress? Had she been barefoot and standing on her tiptoes? Was she holding a glass of champagne? Was there a red rose wrapped around her upper arm, its thorns drawing blood? No, Cynthia didn’t drink. I didn’t see what she was wearing. She was so attractive I couldn’t help but feel aroused thinking of John feeling up her firm, voluptuous legs. Were she and Vladimir all but divorced? Was he soon to be free?
“Babe,” I heard Alexis caution Sid. “We’ll talk tomorrow. Okay? I’m exhausted. Tonight we’re just going to celebrate.”
My date with Vladimir was two days from now. Did he know? Could I tell him? It struck me that Cynthia had taken Edwina’s affection from me, she would have taken my class had I not resisted, she had Vladimir, whom I wanted, and now she had taken John. For what, for spite? She had youth and a body I always dreamed of, a body that would stay muscled and smooth well past her middle age. She had even, unlined skin and straight white teeth. She had attended the most prestigious writing program in the country, and her work would be better reviewed than mine ever was. She was the survivor of great trauma, she had something to say. I was jealous of every bone in her body, every moment of her history. She was acting wildly, I was jealous of that—jealous of her extremity, the fact that she was drawn to John, for who was the baddest boy on campus right now, who was the ultimate taboo? She had just arrived and was already so reckless—what would happen when the true, three-year-in boredom of small-town life worked on her? I wanted to push her into the mud and kick up great puddles of splattering filth, defiling her face, her clothing, her stylish shoes. I also wanted to worship at her feet, have her tell me all her secrets and methods for living so completely and exactly as she wanted.
At home Sid and Alexis sat outside, drinking wine next to the heat lamps. They half-heartedly invited me to join but I refused. They didn’t truly want me there, and I wasn’t in the mood to converse. I was so overwhelmed with thoughts I decided to grade papers. I needed a task that consumed me, nothing imaginative, no room for digressive thinking. I had learned to focus during my PhD, when I had to read complicated texts for hours at a time. People want books to absorb them, but one could force attention upon a book. It would be back and forth for the first half hour, but if you meant it, you could rope your mind into sublime and single-pointed concentration. I printed, stapled, and arranged my students’ papers on my desk and with great effort began to read and mark them. My whole body felt as though I wanted to bolt from my chair but I put a stress ball between my legs and pressed hard against it with my thighs. Eventually my mind settled and I worked fluidly—underlining interesting sentences, correcting muddled paragraphs, questioning sloppy word choice, and writing a paragraph of evaluation on a piece of yellow legal paper that I attached to each of their documents. After two and a half hours I rose from my desk, creaky and stiff. It was midnight. The girls had gone to sleep, there was no light coming from beneath the bedroom door. Alexis had brought her white noise machine, which blared the sound of a rolling rainstorm. Something about the aural barrier caught my breath, and I felt a sob collect behind my upper cheeks. I pictured Alexis pulling Sid into the bedroom like Cynthia had pulled John into the building, enclosing them in their own private world, leaving me alone, bereft, in the dark. I checked in the guest bathroom to make sure there were clean towels and saw that Alexis had hung her neat, segmented toiletry bag on the back of the bathroom door. Feeling rude and unloved, I opened it.